The n-Category Café

There’s a typo at the beginning of paragraph 6. I’m guessing that should be “By now there”

And is there any chance that I can convince you that there's no apostrophe in the plural that ends that paragraph?

Greg: Thanks for catching that typo.

Toby: I assume the AMS Notices copy-editors will render their judgement on whether that word should “Ph.D.s”, “Ph.D.’s”, or the more formal “phudniks”. I was just quoting the website.

I was really enjoying this blog but then discovered that it had ended abruptly in 2009. What happened?

And by graduating not only did we earn Ph.D.’s we’ve also earned you two words which you can spend elsewhere! Thanks for the kind words.

Okay, I’ll delete ‘and future’.

But why aren’t you guys replenishing yourselves by recruiting some current grad students?

Thanks for the shout-out. When will this appear in the Notices? Perhaps we better get ready with some extra-fabulous content. :-)

Thanks for catching that typo — but I’ll have to translate my HTML back into TeX when I send this to Krantz.

I want to suggest that you add something to the last paragraph regarding the recent discussions on the algtop-l mailing list about a wiki review system, but I’m not sure whether that’s important enough to deserve your 50 remaining words.

It’s important enough… not the discussion, but the idea of wiki math reviews. Maybe a word about arXiv trackbacks to blogs, too!

Since I’m a hidebound reactionary determined to suppress revolutionary insights, I won’t talk about the viXra.

I want to suggest that you add something to the last paragraph regarding the recent discussions on the algtop-l mailing list about a wiki review system, but I’m not sure whether that’s important enough to deserve your 50 remaining words.

Which now has a forum all of its own: the imaginatively named r-Forum (Yup, I can set these things up in my sleep now). I wouldn’t waste 50 words in the article on it, but I would encourage anyone interested to contribute to the debate.

(Unfortunately, despite the similarity in name, it doesn’t share login information with the superlative n-forum. I could figure out a way to integrate the two, but then I could also get on with some pending n-labish tasks - which would be preferable?)

That’s what I was told during our last conversation on this subject. I’m not sure how easy it is.

Here is the instruction of how to install latex on blogger:
Latex on Blogger

In the last sentence of the second paragraph, you use the word “commercial” to describe Wordpress and Blogger, but also describe them as “free”. I’d suggest dropping the word “commercial” here, to eliminate a possible source of mild confusion.

You could also change it to ‘proprietary’ if you want to avoid the impression that they are run solely for the good of humankind. (^_^)

Thanks! Typo fixed.

I second that. I couldn’t believe it when Urs asked me to write a paper with him. Me! From little ol’ Adelaide with scanty travel opportunities! :)

I couldn’t believe it when Urs asked me to write a paper with him.

And actually it’s even better than that:

not that people get the impression that I just send David an email asking him to collaborate:

the important point from my perspective is that I would never have known that David would be the one to contact about what I was thinking about, had he not reacted to something I had posted to the blog.

This is the optimal situation that makes blogging worthwhile for me:

- somebody posts something to the blog, talking about what he or she is thinking about, but leaving things half-baked.

- someone else from somewhere else in the wide world, not unlikeky one from a handful or possibly even the single person on this planet in the right state and mood to react to such thoughts reacts.

- and suddenly there is collaboration.

It happened to me a few times here, and it is what makes blogging worthwhile:

- David Roberts had picked up my unfinished notes that we are currently again talking about in Question on $n$-Curvature and then we wrote that article about it.

- Jim Stasheff at some point saw my posts on what back then was called the “FDA laboratory” and sent me an email asking me to publish this stuff together. The outcome was a series of articles related to the stuff we are currently again discussing at DF-formulation of supergravity. Never ever would I have thought of contacting Jim by myself in th first place.

- Lately Johan Alm had contacted me about his thoughts on how to formalize and prove the $n$-Café Quantum Conjecture, saying that quantization is pushforward to the point. I hadn’t even known that somebody called Johan Alm existed! :-) How would we have learned of each other? Recently he visited me in Hamburg and we worked hard on this together.

Generally, the point of blogging for me is to get reactions and feedback and have exchange. What would my life be had I never had the exchange I had here with people like, say, Todd Trimble, Mike Shulman or David Ben-Zvi.

It would be nice if such interaction happened even more often, but probably one can’t ask for too much.

Other kinds of interactions that I had been hoping the blog would serve to accomplish never quite worked out. For instance for a long time I had thought that one joint topic that was kind of a bracket of much of the discussion on the blog was the investigation of the category-theoretic abstract nonsense of quantization. It seemed that we had the unique mix of the right people with the right mix of expertise to tackle that. This was back then the reason why I spoke of the “$n$-Café quantum conjecture” and at one point even tried to summarize What had happend so far. Later I finally realized that I had been being very naive and illusioned here and that this joint blog program had only existed in my fantasy.

Which doesn’t mean that it can’t work in principle.

Of course I meant Tim Gowers’s blog. There ought to be something funny to say here about things growing out of a bog, but it’s not occuring to me.

Mark wrote:

“The internet is still a very new thing”, without qualification, may elicit some grouchy comments from people who were using some form of the net decades before the web existed (not to mention those who insist it should be written “Internet”).

Personally I always try to put everything into a grand historical perspective. Heck, for me humans are still a very new thing! To me, something is ‘new’ if it hasn’t yet reached its potential, come to equilibrium, or fizzled out. That’s why I said: “The internet is still a very new thing. We are far from figuring out everything we can do with it.”

But you’re probably right: there must be lots of people out there who think that something decades old is automatically not ‘new’ — as if Webster’s defined ‘new’ to mean ‘less than 5 years old’.

So, I’ll rewrite these sentences so people who don’t share my sense of history will still understand them.

The simplest way would be to replace the period by a colon, but maybe that’s too subtle.

Can you give any evidence that there are between 500 and 1000 math blogs? I’d love to know about them.

This comment suggests:

the following list should be added to the n-Lab

Andreas Holmstrom also writes:

I believe it would make sense to give the $n$Lab page some more structure

Great. I suppose you both know How To? Looking forward to seeing your additions!

Andreas wrote:

Or maybe there is an even better way of structuring the page?

Don’t worry about it too much — just try to improve it, and someone else will come along later and improve it more.

Talking about it here only diverts energy from actually doing something.

The remark you quote follows my sentence “If you haven’t done so already, spend a while reading blogs before trying to start your own”. My point is that you need to observe blogs to see which approaches to dealing with people are successful.

I’ve tried to make this passage clearer:

Running a really good blog takes some particular social skills. The same problems keep coming up, and there are better and worse ways to deal with them. So, if you haven’t done so already, spend a while reading blogs before trying to start your own.

Thanks!

If Richard Borcherd’s blog is intended, it should be noted that this lasted seven posts, the most recent being in January 2008. And Alain Connes’ blog is hardly thriving.

David is right; I didn’t want to mention Connes and Borcherds by name because someone who got excited and started looking for extensive blog posts by these great mathematicians might come away disappointed.

Borcherds wrote some great blog entries, which I recommend highly… but I guess he got distracted.

His blog is an example of what I meant by writing: “Some start with great enthusiasm but sink into inactivity.”

Of course that sentence was a joke. Indeed, everyone is an idiot to someone else — that’s why there are so many!

But I want to keep that sentence in — first because I want to emphasize how easy it is to set up a blog (‘any idiot can do it’), and second because I want to startle the reader (‘and many do’). Most editorials in the AMS Notices are diplomatic and bland. The world of blogging is not. Anyone who blanches upon reading that sentence will not survive long in the blogosphere.

That joke was stolen from Groucho Marx. “Any five-year old could understand this report. Quick, someone fetch a five-year old child!”

I have added a sentence explaining part of the point of this joke. Thanks, Emmanuel! I sometimes forget that not everybody thinks exactly the way I do.

Hi, If I understand you correctly, there will be some links on the nLab to blogging websites, which is still a work in progress. I have a tip for all those who read blogs for pure wizards using Firefox. Some of these blogs have such poor contrast that one can hardly read the text. Here is an example of a blog where the text is so faint that it started to give me eye strain. Here is the solution. Took me 15 seconds to add this script and with a couple of taps of ‘Ctrl+’ the transformation was remarkably good. I mean the before and after screenshots were worth 2,000 words because if one has never encountered a blog with horrible contrast the evil optic impact is hard to imagine! The moral is that mathematicians who create blogs should pay attention to their contrasts and test on different browsers.

A discussion on n-categories and stratified spaces has been developed into a paper by Jonathan Woolf.

What did you have in mind here – The fundamental category of a stratified space?

About that paper I remarked:

Remember that this is a different approach from John’s fundamental category with duals, since here “paths never cross strata, only leave them”.

If you recall, Jonathan had told us about his project. Does your statement not give the impression that his paper derived more from our discussions than it actually did?

I would like to ask a more general question: why do mathematicians and other abstract researchers need the academic system at all?

I can think of three reasons, all of which could be overcome.

1. Many (most?) mathematicians simply wouldn't be comfortable working in any framework other than what they're used to. This reason will go away with time.
2. As you indicated, funding. The current funding system is probably not very good, but it's hard for people to break out of it, even if (pace 1) they want to.
3. Besides day-to-day bread and butter, academic institutions also provide meeting places. While this is much less important than it used to be, it still helps even me (who am unaffected by 1 and 2) to interact with physically present people.

Thanks. I have added a sentence to the beginning and a pointer to a famous piece on math blogging, so that it becomes clearer what the entry is about.

Who had the idea to call this page “Online Resources”? That’s a peculiarly unspecific name for a page that lists essentially just blogs and just about math.

I don’t want to change the title now that it has appeared in print, but I changed the toc-title.

[John Baez: Thanks. Perhaps you can blame Eric Forgy for the title of this page. I’m not sure.]